


Motherless/Motherland/Motherlove

by Mad_Max



Series: All Delighted People [1]
Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Brief OC POV for first chapter, Canonical Child Abuse, Edwardian Period, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, POV Credence Barebone, World War I
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-28
Updated: 2019-01-08
Packaged: 2019-09-29 02:31:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17194826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mad_Max/pseuds/Mad_Max
Summary: With another wrench, he manages to free his sore wrist and is off before the stranger, the witch, the whatever-he-is can follow. The run home is lost to him in a flurry of street smells and street sounds. Women and men and cart horses and loose chickens blend together. He doesn’t think about the pamphlets in the gutter.He doesn’t think about the man or the frock coat or the paper pigeon that had flapped its wings and flown into the outstretched hand of the woman in the pointed hat. Ma is waiting for him at the foot of the stairs when he gets home, and Credence surrenders himself to her in terror, in gratitude.—What began as a series of strange events over a decade prior has become a dark terror gripping the magical world of New York.





	1. The Census

**Author's Note:**

> This is an accompanying piece to my post CoG fic in progress - All Delighted People.

Two Bridges, New York City, 1915

The toebox of Samuel’s left shoe begins to pinch as he climbs back down the slanted tenement steps at 95 Henry Street. He checks his watch - quarter past noon - and whistles a sigh of relief through chipped front teeth.

On paper the residents of 3B make for a sorry story: the 37 year-old Italian father, plasterer, illiterate, out of gainful employment, not naturalized. His 34 year-old wife illiterate, no English, flower-maker at forty cents a thousand with a nine dollar rent for two rooms with a bucked ceiling and oily wallpaper, and the five girls: 14, 12, 10, 6, 2 and one half. Also flower makers, the whole bunch, down to the little one unsticking paper petals from the bundle sent in by the factory. On a school day. No natural light. Bugs on the walls. Oldest girl with a cough. No license for home finishing work.

Frowning, Samuel sighs again and scribbles, “truancy officer”, “dept labor”, and “dept sanit” before closing his pad and stepping out into the street. The domino-stack row of tenements, shops, and synagogues along the intersection of Pike and Henry make his last half a block before lunch. With any luck, he thinks, this last place will be empty.

He had waited to enter the odd little church until the residents of the tenements and two flophouses had been neatly recorded. Something about its dark windows, its smallness and stillness amidst the bustle of the rest of the block unnerves him.

Even its name is alarming - The New Salem Philanthropic Society. Most of the families in 95 had listed themselves as beneficiaries of its soup kitchen, including the illegal sweatshop in 3B.

It’s almost ostentatious in its modesty, Samuel thinks, with its sheet metal cladding.  
Hopefully nobody home. He peers inside.  
The windows are dark and lifeless as glass eyes.  
Sighing a third time, he knocks on the door.

The child that greets him looks like something out of an old schoolbook illustration of Puritan settlers, a pale face framed by an uneven square cropped haircut in an even smaller child’s cord suit. He thinks briefly of the rag doll he had given his sister’s eldest for her birthday with its scrapcloth jacket and shorts.

“Census,” Samuel says. The little Puritan’s eyes flicker across the pad and pen, and then he steps aside wordlessly, his chest caving inward as though to remove itself as an obstacle from Samuel’s path.

“Your father or mother home, kid? Or whoever’s responsible for you?”

This kid’s entire body is lines - long, thin limbs like spider’s legs and dark eyes - serious like the village kids back home. Refugees now, what’s left of them. If the newspapers are anything to go by.

He checks his watch again as the kid gestures them down the plain entrance hall, past a bench of folded clothing and a line of scuffed boots.

“Yes, sir, Mister -”

“Kouramjian.”

“This way, Mr. Kouram-jee-an.”

The church looks older than it possibly could be. Its scratched wooden walls and floors creak and shift underfoot like ship’s boarding, and the air smells heavy like after-rain. Three small girls sit with unnatural stillness around a massive table, shifting leaflets into piles. As pale as the first kid, their hair in neat braids. They look up with wide fixed eyes, return to their work.

Truancy officer, Sam writes.

The kid leads him past the table to a little cooking alcove where a woman in an old-fashioned black dress stirs soup in a pot the size of a small chair.

“Who is it, Credence?” she asks without turning.

“Census man, Ma,” says the kid quietly, curves inward again as she straightens to face them. “Mr. Kouramjian.”

“Mind the soup.” Wiping her hands on a dishcloth, her voice losing its edge, she glances him over. Sweeps a strand of brown hair back into the bun piled loosely on her head. Nods. “I’ll just be right with you, Mr. Kouramjian. One moment.”

Over the course of the week’s sampling, Samuel has been inside the filthiest tenement flats. He’s stepped over roaches and rats, watched babies play on the greasy floors where parents and lodgers drank or worked or both. The Lower East Side is crowded with barefoot hollow-eyed kids on dirty floors, overworked and underfed and badly needing sunlight and sleep and a square meal. This is different, off. Uncomfortable in a way that needles under Samuel’s skin despite the cleanliness and the girls in their linen dresses and stockings and boots.

Everything is shabby but proud, an aesthetic Samuel assigns automatically to Puritanism. Only the boy - Credence - is wearing clothes that don’t fit. He scuttles like a pigeon over to the stove and the pot while his Ma disappears into an adjoining room that Samuel hadn’t noticed.

“Say, ma’am -“ His eyes linger on Credence at the stove. The boy has his back turned, stooped like an old man’s. He jumps at the sudden noise and drops the ladle with a clatter, scrambles after it. “Say, ma’am, don’t you know all these kids should be in school today? We got truancy laws -”

“These documents,” says the woman as she emerges, “should give you all the information you need to complete your survey, Mr. Kouramjian.”

She presses the documents, organized in a folio, into Samuel’s hands and adds in a voice like a rap to the knuckles, “The soup, Credence.”

Something about this place is wrong, Samuel thinks. There is no department he can report it to. Nothing illegal about kids sorting leaflets, as long as she gets them to school, but it’s not the leaflets or even the truancy he feels like a douse of cold water down the back of his neck.

He sidesteps back into the center of the room, where Credence’s eyes follow, wide and spooked like the bread cart horse without his blinkers, holding the soup ladle at a funny angle, pressed gingerly between thumb and forefinger. He ducks under his mother’s look. Samuel blinks.

“Thanks, ma’am. I’ll just look them over at the table here, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind at all, Mr. Kouramjian.”

None of the girls stir as Samuel joins them at the corner of the large table. Their leaflets rustle, but there is no giggling or humming like he’d heard in 3B, or in any of the other tenements where families worked finishing shirts or coats or gloves or flowers, licensed or not.

He opens the folio to rifle through the stack of papers and frowns.

“There ain’t nothing in here about the kids, ma’am - Missus, uh, Mrs. Barebone.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

“The kids,” Samuel insists, gesturing the spider-leg boy at the stove and the pot with its thin vegetable broth. “These kids. These girls working here on a school day. And that kid shouldn’t be stirring no soup pot at noon on a Tuesday afternoon, Mrs. Barebone. All due respect. Kids oughta be in school learning ciphers and letters and all that. We got laws here, Mrs. Barebone. This ain’t the Wild West.”

She freezes with the dishcloth and a wet bowl in hand, but it’s Credence he finds himself looking to again, standing stiffly and folded in on himself with the seams of the cord jacket taut around his shoulders; Credence’s eyes are still wild, flickering between his mother’s placid dish drying, the girls, and Samuel at the table.

“What would you like to know about my children, Mr. Kouramjian?” Mrs. Barebone asks finally. Her eyes, Samuel thinks, are uncomfortably blue. Midwestern cornflower. Mayflower. His fingers jolt reflexively around the pen, but there is no department for this.

Credence, at the pot, murmurs something quietly to his mother and drops his gaze.

What he wants to know - Samuel frowns again, rubs his mouth around the chipped front teeth. His questions are fleeing, water through an open drain, as soon as he can think of them. Do the kids go to school, he thinks. And why do these kids look like mourners at a wake, and then it occurs to him that the issue is not important. These are not his kids, nor his sister’s kids. He shuffles the papers around in the folio, tapping his teeth, but his mind will not settle on any one question in particular.  
Credence’s eyes are on him again, spooked horse.  
He wonders how long the kid has been looking and checks his watch. It’s incredibly late. He had wanted to get lunch before heading uptown.

“You know, ma’am,” Samuel hears himself announce. “I think I have everything I need right here.” He shuffles the papers again under Credence’s dark stare. The watchful refugee. Reports of fire and forced marches. No more cousins in Arapkir, survivors fled to Damascus and Constantinople. He feels dizzy.

“I’ll get the door, Ma,” says Credence softly. Samuel feels his body unfolding itself from over the table. The littlest girl (he thinks of 3B and 14, 12, 10, 6, 2 and half) returns the papers to the folio for him.

“God go with you, Mr. Kouramjian,” says Mrs. Barebone.

Samuel tips his hat, thinks: Puritans. His shoe pinches.

“Wait,” he says, tongue tingling like it fell asleep. Like it isn’t quite his anymore. He reaches into his pocket for a small fold of bills and extracts one. “Here’s five bucks.” His hand certainly feels solid enough, slapping it flat onto the table. A small relief, although he can’t remember why he should feel relieved. “Buy the kid a new suit, will you?”

He turns on his heel and strides back down the entrance corridor before the boy or his mother has a chance to follow. Lunch, thinks Samuel, and he feels lighter as each stride puts another foot of pavement between him and the little church.

 


	2. Absolution

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ma knows when odd things happen, that they always seem to be of his doing.  
> The census man is gone, and Credence is left to deal with the consequences.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for graphic child abuse in basically all of this chapter. 
> 
> Thank you to those who left kudos! It’s been intimidating getting back into writing fanfic for a new fandom.

_1915_

Ma’s eyes are on his back as soon as they hear the hollow thud of the door swinging into its frame. Everything is quiet. The girls, the letterpress, the stove. Credence pauses, ladle in hand. To look up and catch Ma’s gaze now, with the census man’s five dollar bill lying on the table like an object of sin before them is too dangerous. He has to wait. He stirs the pot again and bites his lip against the sting in his hand, and Ma goes on staring. Saying nothing.

His fingertips itch for the belt at his waist, heart thudding in his chest. He wants to throw himself at her feet and beg for the beating now, just to get it over with. As much as the belt hurts, waiting is worse. Waiting makes his throat feel narrow, but he knows Ma will never raise a hand to him before the soup hour is finished, would never strike any of them in front of other children.

He wants to bolt out through the unlocked church door into oncoming traffic. Like a spooked cart horse or a derailed subway car.

He wants to plead his case.

Ma’s silence hangs over him until the soup finally reaches a boil.

“Chastity.” The pile of leaflets at Chastity’s elbow falls askew as she scrambles to her feet. “Ring the bell,” Ma says.

Soup hour is a blur to Credence, a clang of tin bowls and outstretched hands, dirty fingers. The regular kids know enough to reach for their leaflets before their food. The others are guided by Chastity, a miniature Ma in double. Even Faith knows better now than to sulk in the corner and carries empty dishes to the sink where Abstinence stands ready with the cloth and soap.

Credence serves mechanically - dips the ladle, dumps broth into a bowl, dips again.  
Sometimes his body feels like a clockwork mouse, like it was made for simple motions. Arrange letters. Press leaflets between iron plates. Press leaflets into human palms. Palms in offering, take what is given. Scare out the pigeons. Dip ladle. Dole portion. (Dull portion.) Not too much as to play favourites or encourage greed. Not too little as to be uncharitable.

He lets his eyes wander for the first time back to the empty spot where the census man had slapped his money into the table.

If he had moved more quickly, if he hadn’t stood there like such a fool with his elbows tucked into the sleeves of his little boy’s jacket like such a stupid frightened child; if he weren’t such a dunce, he would have brought the census man to the door the moment he’d noticed his eyes clouding over.  
Maybe he could have avoided then whatever retribution is coming.  
Maybe he would have been lucky enough to have the five dollars in his own pocket instead of Ma’s.

But to what use, anyway?  
Whatever had been done, Ma had certainly seen. Knew, as she always does. Credence has never been skilled at hiding it.  
Is it proof enough now? Enough to damn him?

Skirting the pyre from babyhood, every incident a needling of cold sweat down the nape of his neck. Old socks darning themselves and hair that grows back by morning. Until now, though, nothing that couldn’t be excused away under Ma’s watchful eyes, or else exorcised from him by the skin of his hands.  
Chastity had called him witch that night when he warmed the bed just by willing it, but Ma beat her too before she had taken the belt to Credence.

He scrapes the rest of the soup together into bowls for Ma and the others, jaw clenched until it makes his temples throb and his eyes water, and then he lets himself breathe.  
She hasn’t said anything yet, is possibly not even angry.  
Mr. Kouramjian could have felt ill. As often as he had been checking his watch, he was surely late for something important, for the next family to record.

Lunch passes. Ma’s continued silence is ominous but not unusual. Hope, on the other hand, will only make it hurt double when he ends up whipped after all, so he chooses dishwashing instead. Clockwork motions.

Ma catches him after with a hand on his shoulder.

“Credence,” she says, and he knows.

“Please, Ma -”

Squeezing, so that he has to force his body not to lean into the touch: “Credence, I want you to take this money down to the grocer’s. Give him this.”

He takes the envelope numbly, without looking.

"Buy a pound of rice," she instructs, and he can hardly believe his luck. It feels like a trick as she pushes a fresh dollar into his hand. How many years it's been since Ma has sent him out shopping, trusted him enough not to dawdle or bring back the wrong change; his head feels detached from the rest of him, floating dangerously. It must be a trick. He knows it must. Please, he thinks, let it not be.

"I'm sorry," he says automatically.

Ma gives him an odd soft frown, her eyes darker in the afternoon shadow. She turns, brushing her hands on her skirt as he ducks away in alarm, and sighs. Not harsh nor angry. Not gentle.

"Credence," she says tiredly. "Just hurry up and do it. And don't take any leaflets with you. I want you back early before the evening meeting."

His shoes know how to get him down the block and back in minutes, even as the overstitched seems of his trousers start to strain against his pumping legs and the crooked hinge of his knees. Running has never been easy with a body as awkward as his, but today there is a purpose. A magic trick, though he hates himself for thinking it. If he can get to the grocer's and back in under fifteen minutes, he tells himself, nothing will happen to him. No belt, no empty belly. It will be as if the census man never came at all.  
Erased. Forgotten. Nothing to forgive.

Pike Street is dripping with sleepy heatsick people in the early afternoon sun. Old men at their dominos spit into the heystrewn sidewalk as he tears past, and a woman in a striped jacket curses him from under her sweaty upper lip for knocking her shopping basket. The air reeks of ripe fish and horse dung and fresh oranges.

Two minutes, Credence guesses, might have passed by the time he skids onto the cracked green tile floor of Mancini's grocery six blocks away. No time to catch his breath, he pants against the stitch in his side as Mr. Mancini takes the envelope from his outstretched hands.

"Kid, kid - what I'm-a suppos-ed to do with this, huh?"

The counter rocks a little behind his eyes.  
"I need a pound of rice," he pleads.

Mancini shakes his head, but the envelope is slammed into a wicker basket behind the register as he knots an apron across his round stomach.

"You tell-eh your mother this place-eh is not a post office! Why she does not-eh take her own parcel like-eh everyone else, huh?"

Eight minutes left, Credence thinks desperately. Maybe only seven. He shakes his head, heart stuttering. Please, Mr. Mancini, he wants to say. Just give me the rice and let me go. Too much is hanging on this errand, this little pact he has made with god or the devil.

He shrugs in on himself as Mancini bustles past for a paper bag and the rice scoop.

"You tell-eh your mother, kid. I don’t know -” A wave. Dismissive. Mancini drops the bag onto a little scale, muttering. “Here. For you I charge-eh only fifteen cents. Normally twenty-five. Come here. You still like-eh lemon sours? Take from the jar for yourself. Don’t share it with-eh your sisters. And stop-eh slouching, kid. Porco dio la Madonna - you look-eh like an old man. Go, go out. You’re welcome. Ciao, ciao.”

Change and candy carefully buried in the depths of his jacket pocket, Credence takes the bag and bolts. Five more minutes, maybe. Or four. If he gets back and Ma is not angry, he’ll know it worked.

Somehow the way back seems to stretch on infinitely. Carts and wagons and games of marbles appear where before had been an empty expanse of trodden straw and muddied cardboard. The heat bears down like a heavy hand on his neck, making his throat dry and his stomach heave. At the corner of Pike and Henry, Credence has to stop abruptly. His belly is full of the afternoon heat, the stickiness coating his tongue, pushing its way out. He stoops to vomit into a grate and wipes his mouth.

The rest of the walk is more a stumble. Capitulation.

Chastity and the others have all left by the time he shuffles through the double doors. Out leafleting, Credence thinks with a flash of longing that cinches his sore belly. He crosses the room on tiptoe, dropping the rice and change onto the table en route for the stairs and the fragile safety of his room when Ma’s voice rings out from the depths of her own bedroom behind him.

“Credence - where are you going?”

Her tone snags at him like a nail in his jacket hem, stopping him short.  
Better not to lie entirely. Maybe she’ll take pity, however unlikely.

“I was just - going to lie down, Ma. I ran too fast outside in the heat.”

“Come back downstairs,” Ma says simply. “Bring the rice with you.”

He follows the echo of her footsteps across the floor to where she has set an open book at the base of the New Salem flag, his stomach churning. Not a beating. Beatings aren’t usually a downstairs happening. Ma enjoys the drama too much, the way the whipping rings out from over the bannisters and through the rafters. Uncharitable thoughts. He scrubs a hand over his eyes as though to wipe them out with it.

"Credence," Ma warns.

Drop gaze. Unwind, let shoulders fall. A study in defence. Once he had watched two policemen beat an old drunk with their billy clubs until the man lie limp and bleeding on the curb.

"I'm sorry, Ma," he mumbles into the collar of his shirt. "I don't understand - "

She takes the rice from him, scattering it like pellets of chicken feed across the floor at his feet.

"When you are finished," Ma says, "you will clean this up. I would advise you to be efficient, Credence, if you want a full bowl of rice for dinner. I leave that for you to decide for yourself. Roll up your trousers."

Obedient as a wind-up toy, he rolls them up.

"Kneel."

He kneels.

"You'll stay here until the message has reached you, Credence. I want you to read from this passage aloud until then."

Her fingers appear and disappear like an act of witchcraft for a moment over the printed text of the book she had laid out. And then she leaves him, footsteps a faint scratch against the floorboards on the far side of the room.

“Angel or - spirit,” Credence reads falteringly. “One of - you is a Devil. Our Lord Jesus Christ knows how many - Devils there are in his church, and - and who they are.” His throat cracks drily over the syllables, eyes scanning the page. “There are Devils as well as - as well as Saints in Christ’s Church. Christ knows how may - sorry - Christ knows how many of these Devils there are. Christ - Christ knows who these Devils are....”

"Read it again," Ma says as the sermon is finished.

Wincing against the ache in his knees and his stiff neck, he reads. And again, until the words begin to blur together in his mouth and the spit dries out of them.

"None - none are worse... than those who have been good and are naught, and might be good and will be naught...."

He loses track of the minutes.  
No matter how he tries to shift his weight, nothing takes the brunt of it off the raw skin and sore bone of his knees.  
They must be skinned by now. Inlaid with rice like the mother of pearl crosses in the Papist church.

"There are Devils as well as Saints in Christ's...."

If he runs, maybe the Papists will take him. The Italians or the Irish. It doesn't matter which. He won't be choosy. They all seem to love poor orphans and martyrs a good deal better than Ma.  
Maybe they'll let him sleep under the statue of the Virgin Mary. Maybe he'll die and be adopted by Her.  
In Hell.

"...Those who are good and are naught...."

Some witch he is.  
The only one who would have been burnt alive despite himself.  
And wishing for his end all the while.  
He bites his lip to temper the pain in his knees.

A clatter of footsteps.  
The stove has been rekindled, wood hissing in the grate. She always feeds them an early supper before meetings.

“You may excuse yourself,” she says, closer than he’d realised. He jumps and bites his tongue against his own voice as the rice is ground even deeper into his bruised skin.

"Thank you, Ma."

Relief does not come from standing up. His knees creak stiffly, swollen and bloodied as he rolls the worn corduroy of his trousers down over them. Ma watches, unmoving. Choosing not to see the sting of tears that he blinks away - a small mercy for which he’s grateful even as a part of him shifts towards her.

"I hope that this has given you clarity, Credence."

He flinches, head bowed. Not daring to look.

"Yes, Ma. Thank you. I'm truly grateful.” His throat cracks over the vowels, but she is satisfied, pleased even, and he feels suddenly lighter. Not happy. He wouldn’t know what to do with that. But relieved. Absolved, or something like it.

That is the thing about Ma - it strikes Credence as he bends to sweep the cleanest of the rice into his cupped hand, again as he hunches over the steaming bowl across from Abstinence, nursing her own sore hand - why he will never leave her church. Ma will never let him leave, and he will never try to. Will not want to dare, as long as she forgives him after. Always.

This thought, like a slap to the face or a douse of cold water, needles at him through dinner and cleaning and the meeting after on the yawning, airless corner of sidewalk in front of a little church on St. Marks. It feels weighty. Like something he doesn’t know what to do with, so he does the next best thing and bites his lip as his leaflet is ignored by another barefoot newspaper boy and a man with a brown dog. He lets Abstinence hold his hand on the walk home, lets her tell him in undertones about the Jewish baker and the loaves of braided bread and the language curled in the underside of her tongue that still wants to come out, and he bites his top lip. He bites his bottom lip hard. Blood-letting hard.

That night he dreams himself engulfed in waves of black smoke. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The average cost of rice in 1915 was 25 cents a pound. 
> 
> Modesty was not yet born (not until 1918 according to Pottermore), but Abstinence is quite a bit younger than Credence and was likewise adopted at an age when she can still remember her first family.
> 
> The sermon is a real Puritan sermon by Samuel Parris.


	3. Gratitude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A gift from Ma. A chance run-in with a suspected witch. Credence’s life is growing more complicated by the minute.

  
Credence has never been to the circus, but he's seen posters. The images he committed to memory are of tightrope walkers and ladies on wild horses, freakshow creatures and colored paper and peanut shells underfoot laughing crowds.

Once as a child he had dreamt of sneaking away to Coney Island, straight over the bridge, and asking for a job sweeping up peanut shells or lion droppings or whatever else a boy with few skills could do to earn his keep. He had been stupid enough then, still, to confide in Chastity. The whipping was nothing special. His dream survived the belt and the Bible and the fitful sleep on an empty belly.

It was Ma who snuffed it out like a wasted candle in the evening before bedtime prayers, her hand on his hand on the coverlet. Little boys in the circus without their families met the same fate as Joseph's sister, she said, and she read to him from the book of Genesis. A fair warning: he, wicked creature, would not be revenged. The circus left town. Credence did not.

  
His life over the course of the last two weeks has become a circus act, or how he imagines one would follow; a hot coal walk over Ma's ever-challenged tolerance, the sting of a ringmaster's whip across his red-raw hands, and the smug audience in Chastity, who has decided that her own sanctification will come at Credence's expense.  
He can't blame her, but he can't look her in the eye either.

It's all Credence can do not to jump out of his skin when Mancini's messenger boy thumps on the church doors around supper. For a brief, heart-stopping moment he imagines the census man has returned to gather all the information he missed when Credence did, well, whatever it was exactly that he was supposed to have done to Mr. Kouramjian.

Abstinence, standing nearest, spares him the terror of answering the door, but panic clots in his throat anyway, curling the tips of his fingers around his spoon until the metal bites and his skin stings. He hardly notices he's been hunched behind his bowl until Ma's placid voice cuts through the thickness in his chest, startling him into looking up.

"Credence, are you listening to me?"

"I'm sorry.” He straightens too quickly, blinking rapidly, rocking soup from the bowl. “Yes, Ma.”

She gestures with a parcel wrapped in brown paper, and his heart sinks. What now? Something else he’s ruined somehow, a copy of the census report or however the census works. A Bible he’d burned in his sleep. A cross she wants to nail him to. Rapid fire thoughts, exhausting thoughts. Sinful and unfair. It’s safer to shut down that part of his brain, extract fear and worry. Round shoulders. Look down. He lays his spoon back into the bowl like he’s putting it to bed.

"I said, why don’t you take this to your room and change," says Ma in her soup hour voice, still round and warm.

“Oh.”

There is a small, soft, stupid, untouched little bit of Credence, like the underside of a paving stone, that hasn't yet wised up to the way the world works. That doesn't want to. This side wonders if it could possibly be his birthday, if he has a birthday at all.

Abstinence had a birthday, and she used to get rugelach from her uncle's bakery, and she'd tell Credence in whispers about the flaky dough and the apricot jam until Ma took the soap and washed the words from her mouth.

Even as he's shaking his head at himself, he takes the stairs in twos. There's no sense in trying to guess it, but he does so anyway. More likely something else Ma wants to embarrass him with. Another unkind thought.

More likely she went and got him work at Mancini's, seeing how he's so useless with spelling for printing and the leaflets and at meetings. Maybe the floppy paper gift in his hand is some kind of uniform. At least he can give her an income, something concrete in return for the food and patience and space she's spent on him. Something to keep his body working where his mind falls short, keep the Devil out.

He lets the whatever-it-is tumble from its parcel paper wrappings onto his bed, pockets the twine by habit. Then he stands and stares and blinks.

Unexpectedly, the thing is a grey suit. The arms splay out in a cross over his worn quilt, which he yanks guiltily into a crumple of shapeless dark grey with a tag that reads “Teener Togs” and promises “Virgin wool, Sewn in Illinois”.

Credence hesitates. His fists curl over the brown paper. Never in his life has he owned so much as a pair of underpants that someone else, or many someones, had not worn their shape into long before him.

Downstairs, the clatter of dishes in the sink signals an end to dinner, but he hardly cares for his half-full bowl. Let them dump it.

His hesitation lasts only a breath.

He strips in a flurry out of the patched cord trousers and jacket that a lady in one of the soup beneficiary tenements had brought for him the winter prior after her only son had grown too long and wide for them. They had barely fit then and are chafingly tight now, but he hadn’t expected anything new until the Fall, when Ma would come in with a pile of donations to sort through and let them each pick out a new set of clothes for the change of season.

A brand new suit feels an almost obscene luxury.  
Credence’s hands shake as he holds up the grey wool trousers - long trousers. Real wool instead of threadworn cotton cord. Not little boy’s shorts or knickerbockers anymore. Not stylish either, but modern in a way his clothes rarely are.

He fumbles to detach the suspenders from their loops, fingers sliding over the buttons. Ma will never allow for them. Only women and soldiers wear belts, but his serves a purpose other than simply stopping his trousers falling to his ankles, and there is a reminder in it, besides. She knows all the evil lurking beneath his skull. Christ knows the demons in his church. Ma knows Credence. His inversion. His fingernails snag on the punched leaf pattern as he pulls the leather through the buckle. Act like a woman, dress like one.

Something catches him in his chest on his way out through the bedroom door and sends him shuffling back to stand in the center of the little bedroom with his arms at his sides. She had no reason to buy him a suit. Not after that day. Not after the last two weeks of his sulking and his clumsy mistakes.

Chastity has never had a new dress, either, as far as Credence knows. Always in Ma’s old things, despite the fact that she’s the good one and the one who really believes and can spell ‘witches’ like ‘witches’ and not ‘whiches’, which isn’t a word so much as a product of his unrivaled stupidity. She’ll never forgive him.  
It shouldn’t matter. Chasity would never hesitate to wear something new around Credence.

He lets the stairs groan beneath each inch of his scuffed boots on the way down.

Ma is waiting for him on the landing.

“Well, let me get a look at you, Credence,” she says, and though her eyes are narrowed, there is no malice buried in the words. No unspoken threat. She glances him over once and nods, satisfied. Taking their cue, his lungs begin to compress and expand again.

“Ma?”

“You’ll have to hem it, so it should last a good while. Come and see me after supper, and I’ll give you the sewing box.”

His heart in his chest flutters a sickly, mothwing rhythm, and, to his utter dismay, Credence feels the familiar weight of tears forming in the corners of his eyes.

“Ma...” he tries again, his voice cracking.

“Oh, Credence,” Ma says. He isn’t imagining her softness as she takes him in, the warmth of her fingers pressed fleetingly over his woolen sleeve, his wrist. The tears recede, but his head is still swimming, trying to make sense of it.

“Ma, I -”

“It’s getting late.” The softness melts back from her face like spring snow. Her hand retracts. “Bring the old things down and fold them on the bench. Someone will make good use of them.”

For the rest of the week, Credence puts his best efforts into mimicking Chastity. While she lays new type into the heavy iron plates that he has long been barred from using, Credence mans the press lever. She rings the bell, and he doles out soup like an automaton in a Christmas shop window. He hands out more leaflets than he ever has, finds himself explaining methods for catching witches to curious takers.

Ma says nothing, but she doesn’t beat him either.

It’s the least eventful week of his life, quiet and rhythmic. A delicate peace stretches over all the little moments from breakfast at dawn to sundown and evening work.

The peace terrifies him. The suit terrifies him. Newly hemmed, it makes him look like the high school boys in midtown who used to tear the pamphlets from his hands, laughing, as confident as biblical kings, though Credence had never laughed with them.

Nights he sleeps with his hands balled into fists. There is no smoke, no screaming, no wrenching pain between his ribs. Normal nightmares grip him, dark alleys and circus tents and men with hands that touch in places no one ever should.

By Saturday, he can barely keep his hands from shaking over the break of fast. Ma, as is custom, takes first a slice of bread for herself before passing the loaf on its trencher down the table to Chastity, who hands it over her shoulder to Credence, Abstinence, and Faith, standing behind them. His fingers tremble so violently, Credence half expects the trencher to fly off into the far wall in a burst of blue and white enamel.

After that, he stays away for as much of the day as possible. On edge and sweating down the legs of his new wool trousers. His feet carry him up the clotted vein of tenement blocks up Pike Street, past laundry women and boys with balls and men in black suits. He clutches his leaflets to his chest, drop-head, and walks like a marionette, limp-limbed and clumsy.

In Chinatown, he manages to dislodge a few leaflets to a throng of women with shopping baskets. His relief carries him west, past the briny smell of a fish market, through a narrow crook of a street like a bent elbow that ends in a hidden alley, which he ducks through, blinking, as the light shifts.

For a moment, he could swear the man in front of him had pocketed a long stick.

It will be soup hour soon. His absence will be missed, but he loses control of his own legs as they take off after the man in his long frock coat. A frock coat in summer.

Credence thinks of his new jacket folded carefully on the chair next to his bed, waiting for the Fall and the crisp weather. Ma wasn’t easy to convince. Immodesty had clung to the tip of her tongue and teeth. He was red-cheeked and dizzy by the end of breakfast, though, and she had even told him to fasten his suspenders back on rather than wear indecency out into the street like an advertisement.

The man in the frock coat makes a sudden left through Chatham Square. Credence copies him. His knuckles whiten over the sweaty roll of leaflets in his palm. They cut a quick path down Park Row, where lines of leafy trees act briefly like ladies’ parasols. It’s a welcome relief from the intensity of the sun, but there is no time to enjoy it.

The man in the frock coat follows a route west that Credence rarely takes. Here the streets widen like expanded lungs and the buildings grow squatter and blockier and more ornate. Official spaces where no one has ever been interested in hearing about the demonic underworld that consumes his own.

In any other circumstance, he might have had the sense to be embarrassed for himself with his scarred hands and his leaflets covered in dancing witches, but the man in the frock coat is crossing through another lazy little park, his coattails fanning, and Credence has to run to keep up. Spongey and unfamiliar, grass catches him by the toe and sends him stumbling. He looks up wildly.

They have arrived at an intersection on the lip of what Credence vaguely recognizes as City Hall Park. The familiarity of the park and its square fountain surprises him. He forgets for a moment his pursuit of the possible witch, the stylish man with the stick, and scans the cobbled promenade, through the trees, to the peak of City Hall behind.

Ma had taken him here once, her hand tight around his little hand, boots dragging through an early snow. The memory jolts. There is something else, but he has no time to root around for it.

The man in the frock coat has already crossed the street. Before Credence can react - to do what? Call out? - he slips past a bellboy in a flat-top hat through the gilded revolving doors of a towering building.

A skyscraper, Credence’s brain supplies. He had been a little boy when it was completed. Everyone wanted to come and have a look except for Ma who saw only wickedness in any attempt of man’s to ascend to the Lord in Heaven before His call.

Entering the building is out of the question. Whatever fuel had spurned him this far from the alley in Chinatown fizzles out quickly, leaving him winded on the corner of City Hall Park, watching the revolving door as though the man in the frock coat might exit again any second.

He does not. Credence hesitates. He should go home. Ma will not be quick to forgive him for staying out past soup hour, when he should have been working, but the beating at least will be a return to normalcy. His knees bend in anticipation of movement.

If he tells her he was chasing a witch, will she believe him anyway? She might decide he’s lying to save his hide, which will be worse for him than saying nothing. And if she does believe him -

He glances again at the revolving door. Its golden trim glints in the light of the sun. His feet begin to slide forward on the pavement.

Some things Ma should never know, Credence thinks. He crosses the street in utter ignorance of traffic. A horn blares frantically, a smudge of noise. His eyes feel hooked to the glint of the revolving door. Beyond the glass, a woman in an oddly pointed men’s hat is holding a paper pigeon snatched mid-flight from the ceiling.

That can’t actually be. His eyes take a moment to refocus from the intense rubbing with his balled fist. When they do, Credence sees her again. The same pointed hat, the odd golden duster, not a bird to be seen.... When he squints, he can just make out the outline of something white folded in the palm of her glove.

The revolving door begins to move.

Panic grips him by the throat; he shouldn’t be here. He should go back to the church, apologize to Ma, stash the crumpled leaflets or burn them or drop them down a sewer grate before he’s found out entirely. She’ll beat the breath from his body if she knows what he’s been doing. Chasing witches for his own interest, letting his sweat smear the holiness of the Second Salem crusade illegible.

He takes off down the other side of the building, back across the street with the shouts of coach and wagon drivers pealing after like so many church bells. His skull vibrates with the noise. His feet disturb a flock of pigeons from a breadcrumb feast, and something about their flight stuns him. Hands thrown up, Credence stumbles blindly through a streak of grey and white wings. The pamphlets are lost to the wind. The knees of his new trousers stand no chance against pavement.

“You!”

The burn in his hands and knees is sudden enough that it pricks tears from him, needle in cloth; Ma will beat his blood thin. Late and lost and holes in his new clothes. She’ll beat him to the bone. She’ll send him straight to Hell.

“What the hell are you doing?”

He doesn’t recognize the man in the frock coat until the hands at his wrist have yanked him to his feet. Credence freezes.

“Who are you?” Thick eyebrows drawn into a line. Eyes like brimstone. Not nearly as old as he had imagined, but fierce in the way that Ma’s stillest looks are fierce. His stomach in his throat as he struggles.

“I’m sorry,” he pleads. The stranger’s grip is too tight for him to loose his arm. He blinks back tears. “Please, sir. Please, let me go. I’m sorry for following you. I’m sorry. I won’t do it again -”

With another wrench, he manages to free his sore wrist and is off before the stranger, the witch, the whatever-he-is can follow. The run home is lost to him in a flurry of street smells and street sounds. Women and men and cart horses and loose chickens blend together. He doesn’t think about the pamphlets in the gutter.

He doesn’t think about the man or the frock coat or the paper pigeon that had flapped its wings and flown into the outstretched hand of the woman in the pointed hat. Ma is waiting for him at the foot of the stairs when he gets home, and Credence surrenders himself to her in terror, in gratitude. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the end of 1915 for this fic. We’ll next pick up in 1925. 
> 
> “Teener” is a historical term that predates the word teenager, and “togs” was another word for children’s clothing. It’s a brand I invented, but a lot of Edwardian brands had weird and silly sounding names. 
> 
> Standing at the table behind the adults an being passed food was apparently common dining etiquette for colonial children and especially Puritans. I imagine the Barebones eat separately from the children they feed out of charity, and that when they do, they do it in this archaic way because Mary Lou. 
> 
> In my headcanon for this universe, the Obscurus is still young and much weaker than we see in Fantastic Beasts over eleven years later. Any outbursts are smaller - burst steet lamps and cracked wagon wheels and a shattered window or so, that kind of thing. I picture Credence as having been a bit slow in developing his magic, still having outbursts of accidental magic because of his immaturity at times until the end of his early teens, around this time, when his attempts at suppressing it really take off in coordination with the strengthening of the Obscurus and its parasitic force. 
> 
> Thank you to those who left kudos! I’d super appreciate any kind of feedback at all. Feel free to come chat on tumblr at @punforrestpun


	4. Interim - Obscurus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It comes for him at night when he is too tired to hold it in any longer. It loves his terror, stokes his heart to stuttering, limbs shaking, blinds him so that all he can do is sink into its roar. Taste dirt and dust and soot and ash. Tremble. A little boy again beneath the stairs, the sweet rot of damp wood, enamel flakes that flutter and restick themselves to the shell of a bowl.

1918.

 

It comes for him in sleep now, if it comes at all.

Roiling anger, boiling water fury, and pressure on his caving chest and veins like copper pipes. It stings like hail, blows without bruises, and his heart will burst - tinderbox, coke stove. Eyes crawling from their sockets, blood-hot, and his chest will cave in, and his tongue is kindling, crackling, stretched from his mouth like taffy. Like tar in summer.

Abstinence dies with the word ‘water’ on her lips and fever on her brow.

He feels the splinters in his face, hands, feet, legs, tongue. Wrenched floorboards. The missed step on the stairs, the split skin of his palms. Spurts of gas and flame and shattered glass. A lonely cross scratched into old wood, a child’s body. Not his sister; she was not born here. She had a ma before ma, brothers before him, a shared bed and history and old words and a home.

She will never go to Hell. He will never see her again.

His is Devil magic, divine breath, fetid sin.

If only Chasity had been taken instead.

He is coal smoke and hot tar. A writhing funeral shroud. A crying fit.

If only Ma. If only Credence.

He hates it. Could claw it out. Crack bones. Shred skin. Pray, beg, sob, break glass. It pelts like hail, like ice. Relentless.

In his dreams he prowls lone city streets like a final plague, like the dark waves that swallowed the Titanic, black smoke in the shirt factory, the legless Mancini’s son whose eyes are a set of sodden trenches in a grey face.

It comes for him at night when he is too tired to hold it in any longer. It loves his terror, stokes his heart to stuttering, limbs shaking, blinds him so that all he can do is sink into its roar. Taste dirt and dust and soot and ash. Tremble. A little boy again beneath the stairs, the sweet rot of damp wood, enamel flakes that flutter and restick themselves to the shell of a bowl.

Faith dies and he feels nothing, and he thinks there must be something truly to the idea that his soul is tarnished. He belongs to the Devil, but the Devil won’t take him. Just drag him in the night in sheets of cold sweat through empty streets, through empty tenement flats, knocking empty bottles into sewers, splintering car windows, waking babies.

Mornings he wakes up on the floor with dust in his hair and ash on his tongue. He prays quickly as he washes himself with flat water from the enamel bowl beside his bed, not sure if it works. Not sure if anyone is listening anymore, or ever has.


End file.
